When Will They Learn The Team Comes First

Lake Sports

April 30, 1989|By Jeff Babineau of the Sentinel Staff

I'm only 26 years old, so I can't sit here and tell you how I used to watch Ty Cobb jet from first to third on a sharp single to left field, and how he'd go into the bag with his spikes flying high. He'd dust himself off as opponents could do little but mumble. As the stories go, his spit would find the shoes of opponents more often than it found the ground.

I wish I had could have seen that. I realize it's probably not the most sterling example of good sportsmanship you've ever heard, but you can't question his fiery brand of competitiveness, his burning desire to win.

There are always some athletes like that. Gamers. Athletes who wake up with today's game in their eyes, and go to sleep at night with tomorrow's game on their minds. Athletes who would do anything for the good of the team.

In observing high school sports, especially during periods when tournament time arrives, one sees all levels of competitiveness. Some kids handle the pressure better than others. Some thrive on it.

Some teams pull together, and some fall apart.

Some just have bad nights. If you put this year's Clermont and Mount Dora teams on the same baseball field 10 consecutive nights, I'd have to guess that Clermont would win more times than not. That's not intended to slight Mount Dora, which played very well on Thursday, well enough to knock top-seeded Clermont from the Class AA, District 10 tournament. Understandably, upsets do happen. That's what makes sports interesting, appealing, and often fascinating.

What is painful to watch at this time of a sports season is players placing themselves above the good of the team. It happened during the soccer season, when several key players from one of the county's teams were suspended from competing in the district tournament. In wrestling, it happened all over again. Players attended a school dance the night before the district championship when their coach had ordered them to be home, getting some rest. They were withheld from the competition and missed a shot at qualifying for the state tournament.

This past week at the district baseball tournament in Clermont, it happened again, like a record that skips and skips and skips. A team's star player didn't want to conform to the best interests of the team, so the player turned in his uniform before the biggest game of the season. The coach said he even offered the player an option to return to the team under the condition that the player return as a team member, not an individual.

Individuals play golf and tennis, not baseball.

The player chose not rejoin the team. The coach said the player's attitude toward the ordeal was morally wrong. ''It's like walking out on your family in a crisis situation,'' the coach said.

Ironically, the player found the game he walked away from interesting enough to watch it from the back row of the bleachers. The player may feel the blame for the situation lies with the coaches. But a player whose biggest interest is the team, not himself, finds a way to work his way through that.

Somehow. The good of the team must come first.

I don't use names in this column because they're not really necessary. We're talking about 15- and 16- and 17-year-olds, and this isn't intended to be some wrist-slapping session where somebody must parade in front of a crowd with a scarlet letter fastened to his chest.

The saddest aspect of the situation is that yet another high school athlete missed out on something he'd been working for all season long. There will be a missing page in his scrapbook. He practices day after day after day, in cold, miserable weather in February, and in hot, almost unbearable weather in April. All to win a district championship.

And when the biggest game arrives, he's in the stands, not the dugout. His team lost. So did he. That fact was evident from the look he had on his face when the final out was made, and as players from another team gathered around him like schoolgirls at a seventh-grade dance, ready to hear all the dirt.

In a dugout nearby was a team which, as a whole, was greater than the sum of its parts. It may be a cliche, but it never has been truer. The team's members admittedly have very little in common away from the baseball field, but once on the field, they play as a cohesive unit. Nine players playing as one. And guess what. On this afternoon, anyway, the team won.

Imagine that.

''If he learns something from all of this, then maybe all of this was worth it,'' mused the coach as his team packed its bags for the final time this season.